To burnish their image, the current secret services have begun to connect themselves with Russia’s imperial past.39 This process has coincided with an enormous increase in the number of new books glorifying Stalin and his epoch. For instance, during 2010 and early 2011, about 60 books praising Stalin and his administration, compared to 21 serious history books about Stalin’s time, were published in Russia.40 In the spring of 2007, Russian TV (NTV channel) showed a forty-episode series, Stalin Alive, in which Stalin is depicted as a repentant intellectual. Even the sinister Beria, NKVD Commissar from 1938 until 1946, whose name was synonymous with terror in the Soviet Union, is portrayed as ‘the best manager of the 20th century’. There is nothing about his cruel atrocities in his official biography given on the FSB website.41
Putin has ordered textbooks rewritten. One of them called Stalin ‘one of the most successful USSR leaders’ and used the euphemism ‘Stalin’s psychological peculiarities’ to describe Stalin’s mass repressions.42 The intensive pro-Stalin propaganda has already resulted in the brainwashing of the Russian younger generation. In a poll conducted in October 2009, more than half of respondents over 55, and more than a quarter of 18-to 24-year-olds, said that they felt positively about Stalin.43
The current Chekist attempts to whitewash Stalin and his methods must be strongly rebuffed. I hope the present book will help ensure that the atrocities of Stalin’s regime will not be forgotten.
For me, the topic of World War II has a personal dimension as well. While researching material for the chapter about the International Nuremberg Trial, I found out that the name of my great-uncle, Dr. Meer D. Birstein, was on a list of victims killed by the Nazis in 1941–42, which was presented by the Soviet Prosecutor Lev Smirnov on February 26, 1946 (Exhibit USSR 279).44 My great-uncle was a surgeon at a hospital in the town of Vyazma, and he chose to stay with his patients despite the rapid German advance and his own awareness of the German attitude toward Jews.
Also, like everyone born in Moscow during that war, in my childhood I heard stories about the disastrous year 1941, when the Soviet leadership was not prepared for the German advance and about the panic in Moscow on 16 October 1941, when German tanks showed up in Moscow’s suburbs. My mother, a doctor who was promoted in 1941 to the rank of Captain of Medical Service, served in a military field hospital from June 1941 until the end of 1943, and witnessed many horrifying events. For thousands of civilian volunteers called opolchentsy sent out to defend Moscow, there was only one rifle for every three soldiers.45 In Leningrad there was only one rifle per thirty volunteers, and there were no munitions. Soviet pilots dropped scrap metal during the night instead of bombs, hoping at least to disturb the Germans’ sleep. Since practically all modern planes had been destroyed by the Germans, pilots used old two-man planes made of plywood. The number of Soviet defenders killed during that period, among them many of my parents’ friends, is simply unknown. Even more horrifying were stories about the everyday life of servicemen at the front later—arrests of officers by osobisty for no discernible reason, punishment battalion (shtrafbat) attacks through minefields, and so forth.
The poverty of most of my classmates in the early 1950s was profound. Many were raised by mothers because their fathers had been killed during the war or were imprisoned in the GULAG. And I cannot forget the thousands of human stumps—young men who had lost their legs and sometimes also one or both hands—who were seen after the war in the streets everywhere throughout the country. They had wooden discs instead of legs and they moved by propelling themselves with their hands (if they had them). Many of these ‘stumps’ had the highest military awards attached to their chests, and most of them begged for money. Their pension was 150 rubles a month, at a time when a loaf of bread cost 100 rubles at the market.
In July 1951, these people disappeared from the streets of Moscow. Following a secret decree, the militia (Soviet police) collected them and placed them in specially organized invalid reservations under squalid conditions, and the government reduced their pensions.46 From time to time you would see an escapee from one of the reservations, singing patriotic war songs on a suburban train and begging for money.
All these memories will remain with me for the rest of my life.
One more issue is haunting me: the enormous scale of atrocities committed by Soviet soldiers in Eastern Europe and China in 1944–45. This topic was taboo during all the Soviet years, and many of Russia’s official historians and nationalists are still furiously denying the facts.47 But I personally knew two Red Army officers who tried to stop rapes and reported to their superiors about the atrocities they had witnessed. Both were punished for ‘slandering the Red Army’ and spent years in the GULAG. However, the scale of the atrocities, especially in Hungary and Germany, became clear only from recent publications in Russian.48 It is scary that even now, 65 years after the war, according to the interviews on the website http://www.iremember.ru, many war veterans recall the atrocities without remorse and consider the mass rapes of women and killings of children and old people to be justified by the atrocities the German troops committed in the Soviet territory in 1941–42.
I would like to end with a citation from the very thoughtful memoirs by Nikolai Nikoulin, a war veteran who became a prominent, internationally known art historian at the Leningrad Hermitage. In November 1941 Nikoulin volunteered for the army, just after he graduated from high school in Leningrad. He wrote his memoirs in the 1970s, not even hoping that they would ever appear in print; they were published in 2008. As he states in the introduction, the memoirs were written ‘from the point of view of a soldier who is crawling through the mud of the front lines’. Nikoulin was very strong in accusing the Soviet regime of an inhuman attitude toward its own people:
The war especially strongly exposed the meanness of the Bolshevik government…
An order comes from above: ‘You must seize a certain height.’ The regiment storms it week after week, each day losing a large number of men. The replacements for casualties keep coming without interruption; there is no shortage of men. Among them there are men swollen with dystrophy from Leningrad [in the Nazi blockade], for whom doctors had just prescribed intensive feeding and staying in bed for three weeks; there are also 14-year-old kids… who should not have been drafted at all…
The only command is ‘Forward!!!’ Finally, a soldier or a lieutenant—a platoon commander—or even, infrequently, a captain—a company commander—says, while witnessing this outrageous nonsense: ‘Stop wasting the men! There is a concrete-enforced pillbox on the top! And we have only the 76-mm cannon! It cannot destroy it!!!’